White-Hat Strategies vs. Black-Hat Strategies

White-Hat Strategies vs. Black-Hat Strategies

You’ll often hear SEOs talking about “white-hat” and “black-hat” (or the questionable area in between, often dubbed “gray-hat”), particularly when it comes to link building techniques. This section will outline the differences and cover some of the pros and cons of each approach.

White-Hat Strategies

White-hat strategies are those that are very low-risk to carry out and usually fall well within the webmaster guidelines laid out by Google and Bing. Using white-hat techniques means that you stand very little chance of running into problems with the search engines when it comes to losing traffic because of a penalty. White-Hat Strategies vs. Black-Hat Strategies

A few examples of white-hat tactics are:•Creating your own unique, insightful, and quality content•Building a genuine, engaged community which interacts with your website and each other•Promoting your website to relevant people in a genuine, personal way by writing personalized message

Pros include not having to worry about getting yourself into trouble with automated or manual spam penalties from the search engines. White-hat strategies usually work best for real users, too, and can help build long-term assets that are strong and unlikely to disappear overnight.

Cons include having to focus on the long-term goal rather than short-term gains. White-hat strategies can sometimes take some time to have a big effect on your traffic and revenue because they are less aggressive.

Black-Hat Strategies

Originally coined as a term to describe computer hackers, black-hat has also been used to describe techniques that directly violate search engine guidelines. These techniques seek to exploit loopholes in the search engine algorithms and rank websites higher than they actually deserve to.

Cloaking•Showing different content to the search engines compared to what you show to users•Injecting hidden links into a website you do not own by exploiting a security flaw•Hidden text on a page that is only shown to the search engines, not users, typically full of keywords you want to rank for

These tactics don’t work in the long-term, because the search engines are always looking to stop them from happening. This means that traffic and rankings can drop pretty much overnight if you’re caught using these tactics, so we strongly advise steering clear.